MIDEAST TURMOIL: THE BATTLES

Published: March 4, 2002

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The checkpoint attacked today sits at the southern entrance to this narrow valley, which is among the West Bank's most beautiful spots. The hulking hills on each side are striped with ages-old, pitted limestone terraces shaded by olive trees and dotted now, in spring, with red and yellow flowers.

The valley has long been a dangerous place. Its Arabic name means ''valley of the bandits,'' and the outpost is known as the British police checkpoint, because, to protect travelers from thieves, the British established a position here when they governed the area under international mandate, Israeli soldiers said.

The Israeli checkpoint was established in the early months of the conflict after a settler and two soldiers were killed in drive-by shootings nearby.

It is a vulnerable spot, on low ground between the towering hills, with a blind approach around a bend to the north.

With checkpoints under increasing attack, soldiers here recently seemed even more cautious than usual, stopping motorists at least 25 yards away, then waving them slowly forward but training rifles on them as they inched ahead.

The checkpoint was manned today entirely by reserve soldiers. At about 6:40 this morning, the sniper opened fire from 50 yards away, about halfway up the slope of the western hill, an army spokesman said. He spaced his shots about 45 seconds apart, the spokesman said, and as the reports echoed off the hills, the soldiers could not determine the source of fire.

With deadly aim, the sniper picked them off one by one, the spokesman said, hitting each in the head or upper chest, above his bullet-proof vest.

''One could see the self-confidence,'' Rani Saguy, a settler who arrived during the firefight, told the Israeli radio. The sniper was firing single shots, he said, into a ''tremendous wave of gunfire that lasted 25 minutes to half an hour.''

He killed three soldiers standing at their post outside, then picked off some off-duty reservists who tumbled out of a nearby building. As settlers drove up in their cars on their way to work, he shot at them, and he fired at arriving reinforcements as well, killing an officer. Besides the 10 he killed, he wounded three people, the army said.

Hezi Tzuri, a medic who reached the scene during the fight, said he could not help the wounded right away, but instead pulled his gun and joined the battle. ''When it died down a bit, we started to deal with the wounded, of whom the largest part, there was nothing to do for them,'' he said. ''They were actually dead.''

The gunman finally dropped his rifle and fled. The army spokesman suggested that he might have been wounded, or that his rifle might have been struck by Israeli fire.

After the attack, behind the cement blocks and sandbags of the soldiers' post, stood a loaded machine gun, five grenades, and four yellow rocket-propelled grenades. Such firepower proved of scant use.

Soldiers were sweeping the surrounding hills. One security officer emerged from the scrub carrying a rifle that appeared to have a wooden stock. It was closely examined by several soldiers.

An army spokeswoman said tonight that the gunman's weapon was decades old, and the Israeli news media reported that it was held together by nails.

But, noting the sniper's deadly accuracy, Mr. Gissin, Mr. Sharon's spokesman, said the attack was ''a very professional job -- that's not just some kid with a rifle.'' He accused Mr. Arafat's Palestinian Authority of inciting and even directing such attacks.

The top Fatah leader in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti, praised the shooting.

Shlomo Gazit, a retired Israeli major general and a military analyst, suggested that more than preparation or tactics determined the outcome of even as devastating an attack as today's. ''It's a question of good luck or bad luck,'' he said. ''Sometimes our soldiers will be successful, sometimes not.''

On Saturday, Israeli officers boasted that the raids on the congested refugee camps proved to the Palestinians that Israeli forces could reach anywhere in Palestinian-controlled territory.

Even before today's shooting, several Israeli commentators declared that Saturday night's bombing threw that message back in Israel's face. ''The 'cycle of blood' spins around like a wheel accelerating into the valley of death,'' Hemi Shelev wrote in the newspaper Maariv, in a column in which he noted that, in Biblical times, hell was thought to be in the area of Jerusalem.

But Mr. Gissin rejected the idea that the raids on the refugee camps had anything to do with the Palestinian attacks. ''The entry into the refugee camps is not the cause,'' he said. ''It is the result.''

Photos: Mourners at a cemetery near Tel Aviv, during a funeral for some of the nine Israelis killed Saturday by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. (Eitan Hess-Ashkenazi/Associated Press)(pg. A1); Israeli soldiers yesterday stood by the covered bodies of 3 of the 10 soldiers and settlers killed by a sniper at a checkpoint in the West Bank. (Associated Press); Palestinian schoolgirls fled yesterday as Israeli warplanes fired at the West Bank town of Ramallah. (Agence France-Presse)(pg. A8) Map of Israel highlighting Wadi al Haramiya: A sniper killed 10 Israelis at the Wadi al Haramiya checkpoint. (pg. A8)